Fran Smeath
Apologies for taking longer than expected to reply--I hope you have a chance to read this. I've been living for decades with the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia (not specifically identified until lab test results came back positive for high Epstein-Barr levels). In my case, a long confusing history of erratic but increasing "attacks" on muscles, joints, blood circulation, resistance to infection, etc., etc., turned out to be (still a hypothesis, but huge pile of evidence pointing that way now) years of reacting to dental fillings, where minute amounts of metals like mercury, nickel and silver were leaching into my bloodstream. In my case this appears to have happened because rheumatic fever at age 5 burned away the enamel on my incoming permanent teeth which would normally have acted like a barrier to the usual infections and stresses of life. While I certainly have no reason to believe your husband is ill from the same kind of situation, it is worthwhile for you both to check your records/memories, etc., of the last six months or so before he became ill. If there was any really extreme, unusual, sudden or similarly intense experience, it could be possible that an immune-system trigger went off at that point, allowing his system either to turn on itself in confusion and begin working badly or weaken enough to become susceptible to other disease agents. (I discovered from other lab tests that almost all my good e. coli bacteria have been killed off, making food digestion difficult; and that I have both a chronic staph infection and an overgrowth of klebsiella pneumonia, which keeps me at risk for all kinds of opportunistic infections.) The kind of intense event I'm thinking of would be along the line of car injury (or similarly serious injury); maybe a trip overseas or somewhere else at which he picked up a bad infection that took some intense medical intervention to heal from; a dental appointment that includes something like oral surgery, a root canal that was troublesome rather than routine; especially dental work that involved placing a gold crown on a tooth next to teeth already having silver fillings in them. (In my case, things began to come together diagnostically after my first ever crown, which was gold, was placed between two teeth with large silver fillings--my body went into a firestorm of muscle and joint symptoms--pain, stiffness and weakness of extreme degrees--that lasted the better part of a year before begin brought under at least survivable control.) In Chronic Fatigue cases, it is very hard to trace any originating event, and your situation is made more difficult because doctors, even when they recognize the symptoms, and slide you into the pigeonhole, don't want to take it seriously. May I suggest that you look very seriously yourselves for a doctor who does NOT jump to the conclusion right off that your husband is (1) emotionally unbalanced; and/or (2) overstressed in his professional or personal life; and/or (3) suffering from clinical depression. My personal experience leads me to believe that very FEW people develop Chronic Fatigue symptoms in response to emotional depression, and that there is much more likely a physical set of originating factors which mess up ones life so much that whatever depression appears just comes along for the ride. I wish I could be of more help to you, but I can say that looking at this as a terrible adventure can help you put it into perspective and give you the hope and energy to eventually turn it into a real adventure with a bearable and even happy ending. I'm still here, despite my unhealthy body, and still working at things I love. The great, simple key is to accept yourself as a healthy person who is living in an unhealthy body right now. Please just look head on as your recent history and see whether your husband might have experienced a recent shock/injury/intense experience which could give you a clue to how he became susceptible to whatever is causing his symptoms. There might also be pollutants around the home to which he might have become sensitized (termite spray; garden pesticides; lawn spray; lead residue in the paint in your house: there are any number of contaminants that a susceptible body can be dangerously affected by if you and it or they come into proximity. (And this could be your husband's case, even if there is NO big, clearly identified precipitating event: if his work situation, for instance, is not ideally healthy (even a closed-in air conditioning in a normal office can slowly produce toxic levels), he could have been turning more and more susceptible over a long time and only now showing enough symptoms to have the situation become alarming. FIND A DOCTOR who has his/her head on straight about the seriousness of this syndrome, and don't give up until you find one. Feel free to write me if you need more encouragement, or want to compare notes. Best of luck. DON'T GIVE UP, especially either of you on the other!